


Revelations

by Miss_M



Category: Hainish Cycle - Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitude - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Backstory, Dystopia, Ecology, Ethics, Gen, Gender Issues, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-04
Updated: 2015-08-04
Packaged: 2018-04-12 21:19:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4495119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the Before Time gives way to a new social order, a woman writes down her ideas for how her world must change in order to survive. </p><p>She hopes but does not know how her teachings will shape the world the Ekumen discovers many centuries later.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revelations

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Katherine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/gifts).



> An extra treat for my recip, because her prompt – wanting to know more about the pre-canon society of Eleven-Soro – intrigued me. I own nothing.

I do not expect these words to survive very long. The writefilm is poor quality, and most persons still alive can barely read. But they can talk and tell stories and sing. 

The writing is immaterial. This is what I tell myself. My ego is immaterial. (Well, it is: a concept has no flesh or bone.) 

These fragments may survive in the telling. I hope they will. The me which is immaterial hopes it. 

*

There are very few persons left. This is only as it should be. No one person or group has a natural right to this planet, but only to their individual selves. This, I must remember. We must remember. 

*

Cities and slave pens and harems and group domiciles are no longer possible. We must learn to make do with less, to rely on our individual selves more. 

A person alone is a person responsible. She can learn everything she needs to survive. She can learn competence, ability, work, self-sufficiency. There is dignity to be found here. 

There is also community. A kind of social order. As soon as a world has more than one person in it, some social structure will arise. 

Society will sprout eventually, provided we do not all die soon – the rain and the soil are poison, and most large animals are gone. By large I mean edible. I will never unlearn the selfishness of the society I have seen burn itself up, leaving me behind as its charred remnant. It will never come naturally to me to say ‘persons’ instead of ‘people,’ yet this is of the essence. 

What seems natural is what we learn to accept without question. 

*

Solitude is a matter of safety and autonomy. Persons living apart, each according to her nature yet self-reliant, will look out for rather than overwhelm one another. The presence of others makes us both smaller and more demanding than we would be alone. Than one would be alone. A person alone. 

It frightens me to write this. But it is necessary. I feel that necessity like everyday hunger, like the cold. It has urgency, it presses me. 

I feel like I am talking to myself because there is no one else left whom I knew before, and these others frighten me. I can feel their eyes on me sometimes, stripping me of skin. What kind of world will I and they birth?

*

Living apart from others is only hard if one has never done it. I have never done it before. It is a relief, but it also crushes me. I am always afraid, yet I like knowing that no one will come near me without my knowing it well in advance. 

Perhaps men and women (and men and men, and women and women) were never meant to share space, except occasionally and on individual terms.

Perhaps it will not be so hard for my neighbors’ children’s children. (I have none of my own.)

*

A people is a hungry mouth which can never be sated. Glutted, yes. Fed, no.

A person can be sufficient unto herself. Vigilant, careful, satisfied, aware. She may grow and tend herself like a plant, and help the world grow back as well.

*

Persons will learn from other persons. Society will change, but nature will not. Human bonds will endure. Children will remain attached to mothers, lovers to lovers. 

How to reconcile solitude with having children, breeding, staying connected? 

The child does not belong to the mother. The child is its own.

The child is morally blameless for its existence, and so it is the mother’s duty to prepare it for life. To teach it to do well. Not better – comparisons make no sense once things which are best forgotten disappear from sight. Well.

Teaching a child to do something well will give it dignity and a justified sort of pride, and it will serve a practical purpose: to survive without killing the world or oneself. Or another’s self. 

*

Everything is one thing. What violates the body destroys also the soul. To separate it out is to deceive the self. People used to compartmentalize, then herd together for reassurance. The one fed into the other until the world collapsed under the weight of everyone’s lies. 

Now the self must be separate from others, and the self must be one with all things.

*

Power or personhood, ownership or being. Choices are always stark rather than simple.

No single person has the right to the world or another person or even their own self. Rights are shiny pebbles hung from a belt, they are not essence. A soul, name, self must be earned and not squandered by facile use. 

Slaves and bondswomen used to have no names they could claim as their own. The fevers and hunger of years past (too many years I remember) did not choose according to merit or strength, yet many persons took that suffering as a personal slight.

*

Nothing is intrinsically good or bad. Intent comes from personhood. 

To become a person, one must test and prove oneself capable of existing without depending on other persons to confirm one’s existence. 

*

This world is not dying. People killed it when they abandoned thought and awareness in favor of herding together. We forgot that a person is a part of the whole as well as herself.

Only in that tension can one live.

*

Collectivity is the blight. Solitude is the cure.

*

I speak of healing and regeneration, but it comes out as catechism, a mechanical rhyme to be repeated without consideration. 

The others frighten me, but I keep talking to them. Fear is a part of my soul now, I cannot separate it out.

I think I may be a fraud, but the feeling of urgency will not leave me. So I keep writing and talking to other persons. Action without intent is made evil in the absence.

*

These fragments will not last. They cannot. Everything has its season, and everything is only itself.

The fragments will pass. The meaning may endure and shift with the wind and the rain, and leech the poisoned earth of my people’s legacy. 

*

A people is its history, its legacy. It cannot escape the past.

A person exists only in the present. Now is enough.

It is enough because it has to be. Only what can be should be. Do not break your heart with what ifs. Do not break your soul.


End file.
